Paper Tigers
By Callimachus | Related entries in MediaNeo-Neocon, being, like me, old enough to remember newspapers when they really meant something in America, has an observation about the state of journalism today:
I don’t recall any of the newspapers of my youth ever taking a Katrina-like tragedy or an attack and analyzing either of them in terms of how they affected the rise and fall of each party, and how each party was deciding to use the disaster/attack to its political advantage. It seems to be something that has cropped up in the last few decades only. When did we become so strategic in our thinking; when did journalists begin to resemble sports commentators, concentrating on ongoing play-by-play analyses of who is going to win the game?
It’s been particularly in evidence in the coverage of Katrina, as anyone who’s been paying even a particle of attention has no doubt noticed. And it’s not that I think politicians don’t use events to further their own careers. I just think that the MSM has gotten to the point where this is often the primary story, and everything else is secondary. I am not willing to ascribe to that level of cynicism, and I don’t think it does our society any good for the media to constantly take such an intensely cynical point of view.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 15th, 2005 at 5:24 am
Good comment. Of course politicians do act out of cynical motives, and have always done so. I suppose journalists believe that they are being more realistic by pointing this out. This is the way they have been covering elections since 1960. Elections are the way we hold politicians accountable for their actions in situations like Katrina and its aftermath.